The Apache Wars: The Hunt for Geronimo, the Apache Kid, and the Captive Boy Who Started the Longest War in American History

A stunningly vivid account of the manhunt for Geronimo and the Apaches’ decades-long struggle for their homeland—a vibrant saga of blood, power, family, and revenge from the renowned historian and author of The Undiscovered Country

“An epic tale filled with Homeric scenes and unforgettable characters.”—Chicago Tribune

They called him Mickey Free. He was the only man Geronimo ever feared. And his kidnapping in 1861 started the longest war in American history: the brutal struggle between the Apaches and the U.S. government for the control of the Southwest. When the Apache Wars finally ended in 1890, the western frontier had closed, and the once powerful Apaches had been imprisoned far to the east or corralled on reservations.

In this critically acclaimed, monumental work, Paul Hutton unfolds over two decades of the last war for the West through the eyes of the men and women who lived it. This is Mickey Free’s story, but also the story of his contemporaries: the great Apache leaders Mangas Coloradas, Cochise, and Victorio; the soldiers Kit Carson, O. O. Howard, George Crook, and Nelson Miles; the scouts and frontiersmen Al Sieber, Tom Horn, Tom Jeffords, and Texas John Slaughter; the great White Mountain scout Alchesay and the Apache female warrior Lozen; the fierce Apache warrior Geronimo; and the Apache Kid. These lives shaped the violent history of the deserts and mountains of the Southwestern borderlands—a bleak and unforgiving world where a people would make a final, bloody stand against an American war machine bent on their destruction.

Paul Andrew Hutton, the author of Phil Sherian and His Army, The Custer Reader, The Apache Wars, and The Undiscovered Country, is an American cultural historian, documentary writer, and television personality. He is also a professor of history at the University of New Mexico, a former executive director of the Western History Association and former president of the Western Writers of America.